Technically every Low Earth Orbit is a decaying orbit, but if they want to be sure to let the fire burn itself out, they need it to be in a stable enough orbit that it will still be up there when the fire finishes.

It’s ‘foundation shaking’ because pronouns are one of the most stable elements of a language, and they are almost never borrowed from other languages (as we did with the ‘th’ pronouns) and are very slow to change in form and usage.

In point of fact, Chaucer used singular they as well. There isn’t much direct evidence of how common it was then (we only know people wrote it, which isn’t direct evidence of them actually SAYING it), but usage by Shakespeare (who appealed to common audiences) suggests that it was used relatively commonly.

The biggest factor is usually in vowel shifts. It’s been a while since I read up on the latest research, but linguists currently suspect we’re undergoing another big vowel shift. Depending on how quickly it occurs and how many varieties of English are affected, missing 50 years is plenty of time to result in you not…

The thing I find most remarkable about English is its transformation from a highly synthetic language (lots of inflections and morphemes and conjugations) toward a much more analytic language (where grammar and sentence structure are more important than conjugation and inflection).

There are letters dating from colonial times wherein British men bemoan the fact that the colonials speak English better than that spoken on the British Isles. North America, South Africa, and Pacifica are actually interesting beds of comparative linguistics because you can make inferences about differences in English…

Vowel shift aside? The Great Vowel Shift completely altered how we speak the core vowels in our language. The reading in the video is really understating how significant some of the pronunciation differences are.

Modern technology has actually accelerated change in commonly spoken languages, particularly English, because it has allowed so many different varieties to interact. Add to that the huge number of people speaking English as one of several languages (which allows for more loan words, which English is notoriously happy…

The Braava’s been around for years, so I was expecting an interesting update to the product line when I saw this headline. I also misread “mops” as “maps” which seemed almost plausible considering that the newest Roomba builds a map of its environment as it works.

Agreed. Judo and Jiu-jitsu are some of the best responses you can have when you’re forced to deal with an altercation. Just don’t forget that there are things someone will do to you in a fight that can’t be done in a formal match (the wet-willy defense against an overpowering ground game is devastating, let me tell…

Intent is also a huge part of executing any throw. With a trained partner you know you can execute the ability cleanly and to the best of your ability without harming him/her. With an untrained partner/opponent if you don’t intend to execute the technique fully because you don’t want to harm them, you’ll probably fail…

Yeah, 2 and 5 always get left out of the fun.

*Divisibility by 9 means the sum of the digits must be divisible by 9

I need to do a clean install soon— switching to a bigger monitor and keeping my old monitor in a dual setup has led to all sorts of shenanigans with my desktop reshuffling and resizing randomly after waking from sleep. Also I keep getting a crash on wake up which my limited research has suggested is also likely to be…

I still have no idea what The Division actually is.

She made a great handler, for sure!

During that part one of the groups had him dragging the body to the scanner. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have made adjustments to their prompting for later runs though.

I was pretty impressed they were prepared for the possibility that the players would ask him to cut off the finger.

This is what SpaceX is really for. Elon is building his own space infrastructure to put up powersats, first in High Earth Orbit and then in a cascading series of orbits around the Sun that get closer and closer to the Sun as SpaceX’s infrastructure improves.

Can’t... find... loop. God that’s a magnificent gif.